March 9, 1993

Philip Roth Sees Double. And Maybe Triple, Too.

By ESTHER B. FEIN

hilip Roth swears that his latest book, "Operation Shylock," is true, that it all happened, that he was driven to despair by the sleeping pill Halcion, that he worked in Athens as an Israeli spy and that he met in Jerusalem his lunatic double: a missing-persons detective and anti-Zionist using the name Philip Roth.

"Operation Shylock," Roth insists with a post-modern straight face, is a "confession," not a novel, and he means for us to take this every bit as seriously as the contents labels demanded by the strictures of the Food and Drug Administration.

"The book is true," Roth said the other day. "As you know, at the end of the book a Mossad operative made me realize it was in my interest to say this book was fiction. And I became quite convinced that it was in my interest to do that. So I added the note to the reader as I was asked to do. I'm just a good Mossadnik."
'What Fun It Must Be'

A look of what could only have been bewilderment crossed his listener's face, and the lingering memory of a line in the book came to mind: "What fun it must be for him putting me on like this." And Roth -- the Roth now sitting at the offices of his publisher, Simon & Schuster, not Roth, the book's narrator, or Roth, the narrator's impersonating nemesis -- went on:

"I'm not trying to confuse you. Look, let me tell you something that a lot of people have trouble believing. This happened. I stepped into a strange hole, which I don't understand to this day. There are many people who say they don't believe this and I tell them: 'I'm not going to quarrel with you. That's not why I was put on earth.' But I can tell you that, in substance, this happened. It was necessary to make changes, as I said in the introduction, but they don't affect the substance of the book.

"There will be people who will confuse themselves by being too clever, and assume that I'm that clever. I'm not. I'm flat-footed. Almost every reader I've presented this book to believes this is a novel. . . ."

And so do the reviewers. Everyone from D. M. Thomas in The New York Times Book Review to John Updike in The New Yorker treats the book as a novel, a novel that frequently exhausts the reader's desire to know ever more about characters answering to the name "Philip Roth."
So What Is Real?

"I won't get into this debate with them," he said. "The only thing I've told them is that when I wrote 'Portnoy's Complaint,' everybody was sure it was me, but I told them it wasn't. When I wrote the 'Ghost Writer' everybody was sure it was me, but I said none of these things ever happened to me. I never met a girl who looked like Anne Frank. I didn't have some nice writer take me into his house. I made it all up. And now when I tell the truth, they all insist that I made it up. I tell them, 'Well, how can I make it up since you've always said I am incapable of making anything up?' I can't win!"

It is an ingenious performance, as if Roth means to extend the theme of "Operation Shylock" -- the wrestling contradictions within the soul -- from the pages of his book into a book-tour interview. Toward the end of the book, Roth's Mossad handler, Smilesburger, even suggests that in newspaper interviews the author should "keep it simple: they're only journalists."

When Roth began making his name in 1959 with "Goodbye, Columbus" he was a comic realist, Theodore Dreiser meets Jackie Mason. "Operation Shylock," his 20th published book, with its multiple Philip Roths and multiple references to Philip Roth books, is something quite different, the deconstructionists meet Jackie Mason. There are moments in the new book where the author (or the author's author) seems to regret that drift: "I left the front step on Leslie Street, ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction, and nothing, neither reality nor myself, had been the same since."

There was a time, now almost quaint in memory, when Roth's mockery of Jewish-American conventions, when his sense of sexual hilarity, was capable of outraging everyone from reviewers in Commentary magazine to rabbis across the nation. Those days, he says, are all but gone. Despite the scathing account of Israeli realities in "Operation Shylock," Roth says he expects no scandal.
A Writer on His Readers

"There are still Jewish readers who take strong exception to my fiction and to anything I write, but, by and large, it has diminished," he said.

"Largely the reaction against me was from a generation 25 or 30 years older than I was. Well, they are quiet for the reasons people over 75 grow quiet: they are exhausted, they've said what they had to say, they no longer are professionals with access to print, they're no longer running organizations or at the head of Jewish communities, or they've passed away.

"Among subsequent generations there are people who have been offended, but the numbers are not the same. People who are born or come of age after you've made your reputation as a writer sort of accept you in a different way. The others were people who were trying to stop me at the start or to define me at the start so that it was clear what I was. These battles between readers and writers tend to come at the beginning of careers."

When he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 50's, Roth read the great novels in the canon at the time; Henry James was a favorite. But it was not until he read "The Assistant," by Bernard Malamud, and "The Victim" (which also explores the question of duality), by Saul Bellow, that he made the connection, as he puts it, between "literature and neighborhood." The notion of transforming the Jews of the Newark of his youth into literary characters was born.
A Type of Novel Dwindles

"Until those people had put their hands on this material, it wasn't anything: it was putty, it was life," Roth said. "To see what they could do with it was inspiring and educational. But it wasn't as though there was a small world being mined similarly by similar kinds of writers, but rather an unmined world being confronted by radically different kinds of sensibilities."

The Jewish-American novel, if it ever existed, has dwindled, Roth said. In fact, he said, the likelihood is that other ethnic groups, closer to the experience of immigration, would now spawn new sorts of ethnic novels. "Since we are loaded with such groups now, one would expect to find other people getting the charge and exploding because of the psychological, social and cultural predicament you are in when you are a new group pressing against the big place," he said.

The danger for all novels and novelists, he said, is that there may be no audience left as time passes.

"I don't think there's a decline of the novel so much as the decline of the readership," Roth said, mounting what he admitted was a favorite hobbyhorse. "There's been a drastic decline, even a disappearance, of a serious readership. That's inescapable. We can't fail to see it. It's also inescapable, given the pressures in the society. That's a tragedy. By readers, I don't mean people who pick up a book, once in a while. By readers, I mean people who when they are at work during the day think that after dinner tonight and after the kids are in bed, I'm going to read for two hours. That's what I mean. No. 2, these people do it three or four nights a week for two and half, three hours, and while they do it they don't watch television or answer the phone.

"So if that's what readers are, how many of them are there? We are down to a gulag archipelago of readers. Of the sort of readers I've described, there are 176 of them in Nashville, 432 in Atlanta, 4,011 in Chicago, 3,017 in Los Angeles and 7,000 in New York. It adds up to 60,000 people. I assure you there are no more. We would be foolish to add a zero. Maybe there are 120,000. But that's it, and that is bizarre."
Instead of Religion . . .

Whether it is a matter of television, mass culture or shifts in the way people work and live, Roth said, "There is a change in the mental landscape having to do with concentration," and that is what's responsible for the declining readership.

"For me, concentration is a pleasure, but it's no longer thought of that way by most people," he said.

The number of serious readers may halve every decade, Roth said, leading to the obvious. And yet, he said, he writes every day at his home in northwestern Connecticut, believing in the existence of the serious reader.

"It's what I have instead of religion," he said. "Some people believe in God, and I believe in the reader. But I don't want my faith tested too strongly."